some info. Really it's just a surname. There have been some unusual surnames throughout history. Being a mix of Native American/European ancestry, my grandfather was Cherokee, I have cousins with what would be considered unusual surnames if they weren't Native American. Surnames like Walkingstick, Jumper, Squirrel, Blue and Corn. But if you look into the surnames of European people you'll realize that most are like the Native American names. They refer to objects or skills. Hayes is a European name that mean "Stone Fence". The more we differ the more we are alike the world over.

As disliked as the Kardashians are, they unintentionally brought to many people's attention that Armenians... exist. That they are an actual people... which led a lot of those people to do research about the Armenians, which then probably led a lot of those people to find out about the Armenian Genocide. Tons of people here (from Eugene to Portland) had no idea and now when my friends see an -Ian at the end of a last name, they scream "look, an Armenian!"

I started drawing out mazes in high school too, although I made them so a few fellow nerds could try them out in a Dungeons and Dragons game. My best one was a cube that was made of six interconnected square mazes that you had to traverse all six sides to complete, I put it on posterboard cut it out and even made it a fully 3D maze, it was the highlight of my DMing career

Arguments that "it's a platform" and "it's just the internet" kind of fall flat on their face once you start looking at or thinking about it. Reddit positions itself as being the New Usenet, but it's still a single website, and it does have a sitewide culture that leaks into every other subreddit. Even "safe," moderated subreddits aren't, really, because every post you make makes you more visible to stalkers/harassers/bigots.

Then there's the sitewide admins/mods. I really half believe (or maybe 75% believe) that if Reddit continues to be a major Thing, it's only a matter of time before we find out that (at least) one of the sitewide admins has donated to a white supremacist org, written for a white supremacist magazine, or something. The way they handle issues concerning race, or any kind of bigotry, stalking/harassing, etc., leaves a lot to be desired and honestly often reads as support of bigotry. This is a team that considered ViolentAcrez a helpful mod assistant, but threatens to bring the banhammer down when trans people downvote transphobic garbage too much. The rules lawyer/naive libertarian way they approach anything "controversial" is, I think, probably just an "ethics in games journalism" way of deflecting noncommittal criticism; no one can be as blind to context as Reddit's staff have been. It's standard enough for corporations and media outlets to be as cowardly and lazy as possible on many issues, but Reddit has been so weirdly foot-draggy on things that anyone else would rush to absolve themselves of, like non-consensual upskirt photos of minors.

I lurk on Reddit and have/would defend it from the silly site rivalry that crops up over here from time to time, but it's very frustrating to me that it's pretty much the default platform for forums right now. Because there's a lot of wonderful stuff once you move away from the defaults, but as a site it's super ugly, and there's no reliable way to wall yourself off from the ugliness beyond just not engaging even in places you like.

My friend Chris opened up Myspace from his computer in Connecticut in 2006 and noticed a girl he found attractive on their front page. This girl had no connection to Chris and was not chosen with the "People You May Know" type algorithms used on Facebook. She was just one of five totally random users selected by MySpace to show you that other random people used MySpace too.

He opened up her profile and found her compelling. He saw that she lived in California, but this didn't deter him from sending her a message. Even though this dude messaged her totally out of the blue on a sketchy social network, had a totally random story about finding her and lived thousands of miles away, she wrote back. After a bunch of MySpace messaging and a few phone calls, he flew out to California to visit and soon moved out there. They got married soon after.

What I want to do one day is plan an entire vacation around being in the air or just having long layovers in airports. Fly to San Fran, stay a few hours, fly to Seattle, fly to Chicago and stay overnight so I can get in a shower. Chicago to Maine. Maine to somewhere, somewhere to Alaska. Then Alaska to home. All while hanging out in airports and just bumming around. World's longest bar crawl? I think so.

Yes! Yes! Not bad. You have two typos, two missing apostrophes, both in guitars in the last two stanzas. I think perhaps "amazing feat" is a bit of hyperbole, since I personally know a half dozen people who play guitars, and the world is full of them. Otherwise, not bad.

It's amazing how casually people in areas like the Americas employ examples like "say you have a Russian father and an Irish mother". Coming from more racially homogenous Old World countries, that seems like such a unique and contrived combination.

Unlike the American Corona spacecraft, the return capsule carried both the film and the cameras and kept them in a temperature controlled pressurised environment. This simplified the design and engineering of the camera system but added considerably to the mass of the satellite.

The most astounding fact is the knowledge that the atoms that comprise life on Earth the atoms that make up the human body are traceable to the crucibles that cooked light elements into heavy elements in their core under extreme temperatures and pressures. These stars, the high mass ones among them went unstable in their later years they collapsed and then exploded scattering their enriched guts across the galaxy guts made of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and all the fundamental ingredients of life itself. These ingredients become part of gas cloud that condense, collapse, form the next generation of solar systems stars with orbiting planets, and those planets now have the ingredients for life itself.

So that when I look up at the night sky and I know that yes, we are part of this universe, we are in this universe, but perhaps more important than both of those facts is that the Universe is in us.

When I reflect on that fact, I look up – many people feel small because they’re small and the Universe is big – but I feel big, because my atoms came from those stars. There’s a level of connectivity. That’s really what you want in life, you want to feel connected, you want to feel relevant you want to feel like a participant in the goings on of activities and events around you That’s precisely what we are, just by being alive.

Restrepo—this documentary tells the story of a U.S. military platoon in Afghanistan. It shows the intelligence required to fight in a modern war, and the stress and terror that inevitably accompany all wars. I think Restrepo is one of the best National Geographic documentaries.